What Do You Do with a Pile of Cash?

Apple—the world's most valuable company—announced today that it plans to use some of its $97 billion cash stockpile toward paying a regular dividend of $2.65 per share starting in the fourth quarter, and a stock buyback of up to $10 billion. Apple has resisted paying dividends—the last time Apple paid a dividend was in 1995, before Steve Jobs returned as CEO—but analysts say that the plan is likely good for the company in the long-term. “It will attract a broader class of investor," says A. M. Sacconaghi Jr. with Bernstein Research. “This is something that large shareholders have been asking for,"says Shaw Wu at Sterne Agee & Leach Inc. Over the course of three years, these programs should use up about $45 billion of the cash accumulated during past few years.

Chart of the Day

Obama is having a harder time collecting big donations than he was four years ago, and is also lagging behind the fundraising numbers from Bush's re-election campaign in 2004. Obama is still outpacing his potential Republican opponents in fundraising overall and is collecting a far greater percentage of overall fundraising from small donors than Romney, but the GOP frontrunner has a bigger roster of 1 percenters to draw from. It remains to be seen which type of support will be a bigger boon in the general election.

Reason to Get Out of Bed in the Morning

Although gloom and doom often dominates conversations about news consumption, this year's State of the Media report is a good reminder that, thankfully, good journalism is still an important part of many people's lives—it's just more likely that they'll read it on a phone instead of in print.

The fear of Donald Trump's wrath may have been the biggest factor prompting Carrier to drop plans to move its Indianapolis plant to Mexico. Had President Obama gone that route, Republicans would have assailed him for meddling in the free market.